Taming The Wild West Of Digital Badges And Credentials

After a conference about innovation in education a couple years ago, I received an email from the organizers telling me I had earned a badge for my attendance. By clicking one button, I could publish this badge on my LinkedIn profile to let everyone know.

Curious about the brave new world of digital badges and microcredentials, I mindlessly clicked the button, saw it appear on my LinkedIn profile, and then promptly forgot about it.

Only I couldn’t forget about it. Within minutes I received a snarky text message from my friend Paul congratulating me on earning a badge for attending a conference where, frankly speaking, I had spent much of the time outside in meetings with him.

Properly shamed, the experience reinforced a nagging thought. In all the hype over helping people receive more and more credentials — from college degrees to badges — what did they all actually represent? Might they all just be a symptom of the degree inflation we’ve experienced in America over the last century-plus of schooling? And what would it take for them to be different?

What’s become clearer in the couple years since is that for alternative badges and microcredentials to become viable and transformational currencies — as opposed to extensions of the status quo — people must understand what having the credential means and must value that meaning.

Attending a conference — or a professional development session more generally, as many teachers do, for example, to fulfill continuing education credits — is just doubling down on our current system that values time spent learning. If someone has the credential, I know they attended something for a certain length of time, full stop. It doesn’t, however, help me understand what someone now knows or can do. Any innovations in digitizing these sorts of experiences or making it easier to represent and communicate their attainment doesn’t change what that credential means all that much.

A competency-based credential, however, would flip this on its head. In that world, you’d earn a badge for demonstrating mastery of a set of knowledge and skills. Whether you learned that skill outside of a formal educational experience or inside wouldn’t matter. Nor would it matter if you sat in a seat to learn it for a week or online for a few hours. What would matter is you had the skillset. This is how certifications like those from Cisco or many of the microcredentials that Digital Promise and Bloomboard offer for teachers operate in effect.

The notion of “demonstrating mastery” implies another thing. For people to believe that the credential really represented mastery of something, it would need to have a reliable, valid, and trustworthy assessment of one’s knowledge and skills. That could range from a traditional test to the evaluation of a work product or performance of some skills.

Certificates like those from Cisco have long had this element. But many of the microcredentials that have exploded as of late — and there are now well over 4,000 certification bodies in the United States — do not. Many of these new credentials have been much more similar to the badge I “earned” by attending a conference. And they have been similarly devoid of much meaning and value.

All of this makes moves by Degreed, where, full disclosure, I am an investor, and Pluralsight so interesting, as they try to bring order to this Wild West of badges.

Pluralsight has developed a diagnostic tool to ascertain individuals’ skill levels against third-party certificates with exams to give employees a measure of how much more work they must do to successfully earn the certificate and employers a read of the skill level of their employees.

Degreed has gone further in its efforts to be a central bank of credentials. Last month the company launched Degreed Skill Certification, which evaluates an individual’s submitted work and then ranks and certifies her.

Degreed doesn’t have its own curriculum. Instead it is saying you can learn whatever you want to master — Degreed offers over 1,500 skill-based certificates at the moment — and then show mastery of it by submitting evidence alongside testimonials from endorsers who publicly back your claim of having the skill. Degreed then has peers who are applying for the same skill certification and expert psychometricians — people trained in the administration and interpretation of assessments — anonymously evaluate the work and give you a score based on the rubric.

These scores are pulled together alongside the testimonials, and Degreed provides the individual with a skill expertise level that is ranked 1 through 8. The individual can then use that skills certification level that has been validated by a third-party with employers and others. And when someone has learned more — on the job or in a course — and wants to show she has leveled up, she can repeat the process.

Employers can also take Degreed Skill Certification to benchmark the skill levels of its current employees in a far more granular way than the traditional resume and job postings might to understand the true skills at the heart of its operation and what skills matter for successful employees. They can take that knowledge to invest in their workforce and help them improve their skills — and measure the improvements. The resulting transparency could be a game changer in helping employers more precisely understand what they need when they hire. And that in turn could help them better articulate to educators what they need, not what they say they want — the latter having helped fuel degree inflation as employers simply resort to saying employees must have a Bachelor’s degree for a certain position, with no knowledge of how relevant that degree is or isn’t.

In the longer term, one could imagine this starting to decouple degrees and credentials themselves from those that provide the training for them, but that’s a much longer shift. For now, I’ll settle for efforts like those of Degreed and Pluralsight starting to clear the field of mindless credentials like the one I posted on my LinkedIn profile a couple years ago.